Finding Paris

by Joy Preble

  But so what?

  My gaze drifts over the bracelets, beads, and shoes scattered around me. I smell traces of hot glue gun lingering in the air. Then the door creaks and Tommy Davis—wearing tight-fitting cowboy-type jeans, a Harley T-shirt, and brown lace-up John Deere boots—stomps into the room.

  I jump.

  “Where’s your sister?” he asks, standing over me.

  I hoist myself off the floor, leaping up so fast that my feet feel momentarily unsteady. Tommy reaches out a hand, grips my arm. I see my mother’s name, Callie, tattooed on the inside of his wrist, the final e twisting up at the end.

  “I’m fine,” I say, and he lets go, then waves Mom’s note at me, and it slips from his fingers, fluttering to the floor next to Paris’s boots. There’s a hint of liquor on his breath still.

  “Why’s your mother out looking for Paris?”

  “She ditched me,” I say, trying to sound casual about it. “Paris. At a diner. She went out to the car and didn’t come back. She’s not answering her cell, either.” I hesitate, and when his face remains neutral I add, “You know Paris. It’s just one of her . . . things. She left me a note. Like some game or something.”

  Tommy scrapes his teeth over his lower lip. He shakes his head. “Your sister is a pain in the ass sometimes, isn’t she?”

  I frown. “She’s not your business, Tommy. I’ll take care of it.”

  I wait for him to get pissed off, the way he does when Paris or I tell him to mind his own business, but instead he asks, “You want to drive around looking for her? I’ll take you, Leo. Your mother won’t be out there much longer. You know her.” He taps his jeans pocket and his keys jingle. “C’mon,” he says. “Go for doughnuts while we’re at it. You like that Devil Doughnuts place, right? They’re probably putting out the first ones right now.” He fishes the keys from his pocket with two fingers.

  “Maybe,” I say, even though I mean no. I start toward the door. I don’t like him in Paris’s room, her space.

  He rests a hand on my shoulder. “So what were you two up to out there?” he asks, conversational about it. “What diner? You go anywhere else?”

  I shrug, but his hand stays put. “Around. You know.” I take another step. His hand slides off.

  “I made coffee,” I say. “You see it?” I had been tired, but now I am fully awake.

  “Your sister is eighteen,” Tommy says, not commenting on the coffee. “She can do what she wants, Leo.”

  I walk another few steps, weaving my way around all the crap and shoes on the floor. He follows.

  “Leo.” He pauses, and there is something about the absence of sound that makes me turn. “How’d you get home?”

  It takes me a beat too long to work up the lie. “Cab,” I say. “Thanks for the mad money.” The phrase was awkward sounding when he said it, even worse when I do. In my head I see that crumpled bill riding the breeze over Paradise Road. It’s a dumb lie. My mother met Max.

  Tommy glances around, then back to me.

  “What are you doing in here anyway?” he says, like he suddenly finds it strange I’d be in my sister’s room. “You know how she is about people touching her shit.”

  We stand there for a few long beats.

  “You two picking up guys?” he asks. His voice lowers. “Is that where she is, off with some guy?”

  “No!” I say, voice sharp. In my head, I think of Max Sullivan, who I told to get lost.

  “Chill, Leonora,” Tommy says. “You sure do get worked up about things.” He runs his hand lightly down my arm.

  “Don’t,” I say.

  “You back there, Tommy?” calls my mother’s voice—tired and annoyed sounding—from the other end of our skinny hallway. “Where the hell have you been? I come home after a double shift and there’s Leo with—”

  She stops talking as she walks into the room, face pinched and pale. Her eyes fix on Tommy. On his hand, resting at the top of my wrist.

  “How long have you two been home?” she asks, voice tight.

  Tommy takes his hand away.

  “Did you find Paris?” I ask, even though it’s clear she hasn’t. She’s wearing a sleeveless turquoise shirt with a scoop neck and the skin at her collarbone looks red and blotchy. Her black yoga shorts are stretched tightly over her thighs.

  Mom crosses her arms. Her fake nails are growing out and I can see the half-moons of her pale cuticles. “I drove around,” she says, “to that dance club in Henderson your sister goes to even though she thinks I don’t know about it.”

  I stare at her, startled. She pays like zero attention to what we do. But somehow she knows this.

  “And where have you been this whole time, Leonora?” she asks, even though she knows full well she told me to deal with it. “Where’s that boy?”

  “Boy?” Tommy’s brows lift. “What boy?”

  “No one,” I say. “It’s—we . . . I found another note,” I correct, pulse thrumming. “I don’t know what it means. I don’t know where she is.” I force myself to breathe slowly. “Maybe we should call the cops.”

  “We don’t need the cops.” Tommy’s voice lazes out. He rubs his nose with the back of his hand. “Your sister knows how to take care of herself. She’ll be back when she’s back. I don’t know what you two are so hysterical about.”

  “You been drinking?” Mom’s gaze cuts to Tommy. Her voice sharpens dangerously.

  “I can handle it,” he says, shrugging, hands palms up. Then to me: “You make this mess in here? You know your sister likes things just so.”

  Is he serious?

  He stoops slowly, making a production of it, picks up Paris’s black boots and sets them neatly together at the foot of her bed.

  My mother says nothing.

  “Mom,” I say. “We need to do something. Maybe something happened.” The thought makes my throat feel hollow.

  “Nothing happened,” Tommy says.

  “How the hell do you know?”

  “Watch your mouth, Leo,” Mom snaps.

  Tommy Davis looks me square in the eyes, not blinking.

  The flush on my mother’s chest rushes up her neck to the roots of her hair.

  “Leonora.” Mom runs her gaze over me, something in her eyes that I can’t read. “I told you before. Your sister is a drama queen. I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “Then why did you go out looking for her? Why aren’t you asleep?” My voice spikes, and Mom’s eyes momentarily widen.

  “Don’t yell at your mother,” Tommy says. “Jesus, Leo.” He lifts his hands like I’m robbing him. “Calm the hell down.”

  My mind flashes briefly to Max, standing with me on the roof of the Stratosphere, shoving asshole Nate.

  “Fuck you,” I say.

  “Go to your room!” Mom screams.

  Our eyes lock, this same woman who used to take us for picnics on the beach at Santa Monica. My mother, who always said hello to the white statue of Saint Monica that stands above the beach not far from Wilshire. “Hey, Mon,” she’d call breezily. “How’s the saint business going?” She’d run her hand over Saint Monica’s feet, then take us to the pier for hot, greasy churros.

  Now my mother drops her gaze. “Go to your room, Leo. Please.”

  Door closed, my desk chair under the handle because nothing actually works in this house and even if I click the lock button the knob turns if you jiggle the handle—I sit on my bed, hand pressed to my knees, listening. Waiting for her to tell him that her girls are her business and not his, which she has told him before.

  But I hear them walk away, then the clanging of dishes in the kitchen and then nothing, which means they’ve gone to their room, and I’m left with the sound of my too-fast breathing. Hot, angry tears rush from my eyes.

  It is edging past nine in the morning. The sun is shining outside my window, the desert heat attempting to muscle its way in. Yesterday it was 106 degrees. In the summer it hardly ever rains. It didn’t rain much in LA, either. But there was the ocean. I see
it in my mind again, over the shoulders of the sparkling white statue of Saint Monica, past the wide expanse of beach.

  I stand. I pace, walking in circles until, lacking any better idea, I sink cross-legged in front of my old dollhouse with its garish multicolored rooms, remembering how I’d worried earlier that Max would make fun of it. Because I’m seventeen, not seven.

  But I love that house, probably more than I’ve ever loved any of the places we’ve lived, any of the real rooms I’ve made my own. And the dolls that Paris helped me make for it, recycling old cheap plastic dolls and doing up their hair and finding outfits for them to wear: one that was supposed to be me, dressed in jeans and a red shirt and this tiny dorky white cardigan that she’d found at a resale shop on Melrose. She’d stitched Leo on it in pretty yellow thread with this silly smiley-face underneath, all so tiny that I had no idea how she’d done it. We’d placed it in the pink-decorated bedroom and—after a brief debate on which color best reflected each of us—disregarded all logic on that issue and declared it the Leo room.

  The Paris doll had lighter hair and a tiny bracelet on its skinny plastic wrist and redder lips that Paris had painted in an oil paint that even all these years later hadn’t chipped. We gave that doll the bedroom we painted red like those lips.

  My sister and I played with that house for a long time. No matter where we landed as our mother bounced us from place to place, the dollhouse stayed the same. Each time we’d move, I’d set it up exactly, each doll and piece of furniture precisely as it had been.

  Without meaning to, my mind drifts to Max. Is he sleeping? Is his hair still sticking out, that one strand still curling down by his neck?

  And then I see the dolls.

  The Paris doll isn’t in its red bedroom anymore. Instead, it’s propped into the little rocking chair near the fireplace in my pink room. The Leo sweater doll is resting on the cute four-poster bed that I always wished was mine in real life.

  The rocking chair—which I had angled toward the fireplace—is now turned to the mini four-poster bed, the Paris doll propped in it, facing the Leo doll—almost like it’s guarding it.

  And then my eyes go wide. In the red Paris room, a piece of paper sits on the tiny white wooden chest of drawers. I pick it up and read the message in minuscule but distinctly Paris script:

  You need to leave this house, Leo. You need to find me. Now.

  I read it over and over, breath freezing in my lungs.

  One thought repeats: not a game. Something has happened to Paris. But what?

  My hands shake as I stand and walk to my closet, thoughts flying, heart pounding. I open the door, half expecting Paris to be crouched in there, hiding. Once she’d waited an entire day until I opened our refrigerator and screamed my head off because she’d placed her old rubber Frankenstein head from Halloween in there.

  But she’s not here. Of course she’s not here. The fear returns and tightens.

  I have to find her. I have to go now. Do I tell Mom? Will she believe me? Will she care? The words of this new note sear into me. You need to leave this house, Leo. You need to find me. Now.

  I rush to the back of the closet, stretch up, and reach behind folded blankets for the box. My fingers touch it, tapping it closer until I can slide it forward and wrap my hand around the raggedy cigar box I’d decorated with smiley-face stickers back in third grade.

  My breath catches as I open the lid, expecting to see my old green pencil bag, the one that holds the fat wad of rubber-banded bills: $5,780 in twenties and tens and fives and ones. Lots of ones because we have a tip jar at Yogiberry and at the end of each week we split the proceeds. My entire life savings. Not much of a hiding place, but who would ever look up there but me?

  But the box is too light now, and I know before I see it what I’m going to find.

  It’s gone. All of it. Every single bill. Every single dollar. Just an empty box.

  Well, not completely empty.

  Inside, smiley-face stickered to the white bottom, sits one other note.

  Find me. I’ve got your money safe, but I need you, L. xoParis

  ELEVEN

  I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE MAX LIVES, BUT I HAVEN’T BEEN SITTING ON THE park swing for long when he pulls up. My heart is drumming, and my back is clammy with sweat under my tank top, and I keep glancing down the street, more than half expecting Mom or Tommy to be striding toward me. But no one comes except Max.

  He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t say anything, not even “How are you?” The first thing Max does is this: he wraps his arms around me and holds me tight. His face is very, very close and he smells like night air and heat. I do not push him away.

  We sit like this for a while, not saying anything. The notes from the dollhouse and the cigar box are clutched in my hand. My heart is beating insanely fast.

  Max holds me until it slows down.

  Then I explain. At least the parts I can.

  “I have to tell it from the beginning,” I say. “Is that okay?”

  He makes a face at the last part, like this is a silly thing to say. I follow him to a molded plastic bench a few feet away. “From the beginning,” he says.

  I tell him. The dollhouse, the notes, the money.

  “It’s gone,” I squeak eventually. “All of it. Every single dollar.” I can’t tell him the number. I just can’t.

  “I’m so stupid,” I say. “God.”

  Max’s gaze does not leave me as I talk. His frown is very deep. We sit on the bench and he studies the scrap of lined spiral notebook paper from all angles, as though this is going to change what it says. He brushes his finger over the shreds of ripped spiral on its side.

  On a shaky breath, I say, “She has my life savings. My college money.”

  He’s silent for so long I think that maybe he doesn’t believe me.

  Then he smiles tightly and says, “Guess she wants to make sure you come after her, huh?”

  I nod mutely.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out, though, okay?”

  It’s the “we” that calms me down. Or maybe just how his voice is deep and even as he says it.

  “Okay,” I say, nodding. My heart slows to a normal person’s.

  We sit together some more, and I hold on to what I didn’t tell Max, don’t tell him even now: how after I stepped from the closet, I started for the door. Decided I would tell my mother. I hated her now for many reasons, but she needed to know this, right? That Paris had taken my hidden cash and was maybe gone for real, maybe in trouble or hurt or . . . who the hell knew what. Shaking, I walked down the hall.

  From the other side of the house as I neared the kitchen, I heard Tommy’s voice rise again and my mother’s in response. She laughed, low and throaty. Floorboards creaked. More laughing.

  “Love you,” I heard my mother say through the thin walls of our no-privacy house.

  It was not the words that made me change my mind. It was the light, girlish sound and pitch of her voice. I knew in the pit of my stomach that if I knocked on their door, she would tell me to figure it out myself.

  I waited. One second. Two. Three. At ten, I walked into the kitchen. I unzipped my mother’s purse. From her wallet, I took four twenty-dollar bills, leaving her three. On the rare occasions I sneak money from my mother’s wallet, I always leave some behind so she doesn’t notice right away. So she thinks maybe she spent it and just forgot.

  My hand hesitated over her cell phone, but only briefly. I took that, too.

  On the top of a small stack of yellow Post-its resting by the stove, I wrote: Gone to find Paris. My hand shook and my heart was beating in my ears, but my mother had sided with Tommy Davis. Was always going to side with him. What else was there to say?

  Out on the street, I walked around the corner and then another full block before I used Mom’s cell, pressing in the numbers I had memorized even though Max had written them down for me.

  He’d answered on the third ring, his voice full of sleep, then instantly alert when I
said his name.

  “Leo. Are you okay? Did Paris come home?”

  “No.”

  I was crying then, even though I do not cry in front of boys or anyone, but the more I tried to stop, the more the tears came. Why had I called him? I should hang up.

  “Where are you?” Max asked.

  “I’m sorry I bothered you. I— Don’t worry.”

  “Where are you, Leo?” In the silence that followed, I heard him breathing.

  Two blocks down from our house is a little park with a bench and a swing and a plastic jungle gym that’s always too hot to touch and a patch of pebbles and weeds that used to be grass.

  I hesitated. He stayed silent with me, but somehow I could hear him waiting. I told him where I was.

  “I’ll be right there,” said Max Sullivan, the boy I’ve known for less than a day. “Stay put.”

  “I’m fine. Really. I just . . .”

  But he’d already hung up.

  “So here’s the thing,” Max says. We’re in the Ranger now, engine cranked and idling. We have come up with no particular plan on how to make my sister reappear. “I have to go to work for a few hours.”

  “Shit,” I say, and Max cocks his head. “Me, too. Work, I mean.” My hands flutter up for emphasis, and knock into a little Christmas-tree-shaped air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror along with his museum hangtags.

  I tap the tree again with my finger, and when I glance over at Max, he’s blushing.

  “It’s supposed to get rid of the French fry smell.”

  “It’s working.” Actually, it’s added fake pine smell to stale fast food, but I decide this is one of those cases where it’s the thought that counts.

  I call in sick to work, to which I am already late. Kyle threatens to fire me and I say go ahead and he says fine and then hangs up. My stomach bunches into knots—I need this job. I need the money. But I tell myself that the fake pine air freshener smells better than most of the frozen yogurt at Yogiberry. Probably tastes better, too. I will remember this when I’m groveling to get my job back tomorrow.

  “Frozen yogurt, huh?”

  “Queen of the dessert industry. That’s me.” I smile as brightly as possible. “My parfaits are killer. Absolutely.”